RCN Update No.6 July 2016 View this email in your browser LANGUAGE & WETLANDS Ramsar Culture Network Update The Biocultural Challenge for Wetlands Editorial by Dr Peter Bridgewater, RCN Biocultural DiversityThematic Group Lead Welcome to the language and wetlands edition of the newsletter! There is a series of excellent articles for you in these newsletter pages, and I encourage you to read them from cover to cover. But in the next few paragraphs I want to discuss how language diversity and biological diversity have much in common, and form the framework for biocultural diversity. The excellent interview from Luisa Maffi has more on this. The 1995 UNESCO report of the World Commission on Culture and Development quotes Amadou Hampâté Bâ as follows: “In Africa when an old man dies, a library burns down”. He meant the store of cultural knowledge that such a person holds – but the expression of such cultural knowledge, its intergenerational passage and its realworld application is through language. Postulated extinction rates for languages parallel those for species
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Ramsar Culture Network UpdateRCN Update No.6 July 2016 View this email in your browser LANGUAGE & WETLANDS Ramsar Culture Network Update The Biocultural Challenge for Wetlands Editorial
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RCN Update No.6 July 2016View this email in your browser
LANGUAGE & WETLANDS Ramsar Culture Network Update
The Biocultural Challenge for WetlandsEditorial by Dr Peter Bridgewater, RCN Biocultural DiversityThematic Group Lead
Welcome to the language and wetlands edition of the newsletter!
There is a series of excellent articles for you in these newsletter pages, and I encourageyou to read them from cover to cover. But in the next few paragraphs I want to discusshow language diversity and biological diversity have much in common, and form theframework for biocultural diversity. The excellent interview from Luisa Maffi has more onthis.
The 1995 UNESCO report of the World Commission on Culture and Development quotesAmadou Hampâté Bâ as follows: “In Africa when an old man dies, a library burns down”.He meant the store of cultural knowledge that such a person holds – but the expressionof such cultural knowledge, its intergenerational passage and its realworld application isthrough language. Postulated extinction rates for languages parallel those for species